Poetry

Author:

Various

ISBN: 9781902638881

If you are going on holiday to some boring place like Lanzarote or Malta, take it with you. It would be good to read each poem, preferably aloud, against some unsuitable background... Only through an anthology of this range and depth, covering a century of writing, can one see how the styles and substances change.- Roundyhouse Magazine

Poetry 1900-2000 is ... a cultural act, and a landmark in the English language writing of Wales. It is by far the most comprehensive collection of Welsh poetry in English in the Twentieth-century which we have had – or are likely to have.- Tony Brown, Cambria

Synopsis:

Poetry 1900-2000 brings together a vibrant expression of the industrial, pastoral, rural, urban, religious, political and linguistic experience of Wales in the twentieth century world. The poetry collected here is as varied as Wales itself, and ranges from the well known to the startling, from the lyrical to the experimental, the celebration of tradition to that of protest. Each poet’s biography situates the writer in a social and literary context, and the collection presents an unparalleled panorama of the development of Welsh poetry in English in the twentieth century.

A preface is literally that, a saying or writing beforehand. Usually, though, they are written afterwards, after a reading of the contents. The purpose especially of the preface to a book such as this is usually to explain or justify what is in it or even to persuade a potential reader to buy it. In the case of this volume in this series this is hardly necessary. After all, the series itself came about in 2005 when the then Minister for Culture in the Welsh Government, Alun Pugh AM, accepted a recommendation from the Culture Committee of the National Assembly that such a series should be funded and published and placed in all schools and libraries. The series is itself a cultural act, yet another feature of the nation-building that had been going on throughout the twentieth century but has proceeded apace since its turn into the twenty-first.